Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to determining pricing and, in particular, to determining pricing using categorized costs with tree structures.
Description of the Related Art
Information Technology (IT) service providers compete to win high valued IT service contracts. Typically, clients ask for proposals that specify the pricing of a service contract that includes multiple services and enter a deal bidding process. It is important for the IT service providers to expeditiously estimate the price of an IT service contract and also to produce a competitive price (bid) for the contract.
There would be two typical approaches used by a solution manager to estimate price. In a first approach, directed to minimizing the time spent for providing a service, the solution manager estimates the price by selecting a unit cost for each service based on past deals with which they were involved. In a second pattern, the solution manager estimates the price by breaking down the contract into several services, investigating the customer's requirements and service costs, and summing up the costs for the contract. However, the first approach sometimes does not reflect the market trend or does not take the deal volume into consideration. The second approach can take too much time to estimate the price and therefore result in a loss of the deal. In either case, both approaches can hinder the winning of new contracts.